Business magazines are struggling in the post-crash online world. I'm a subscriber of Forbes and BusinessWeek and I love both magazines, but yeah, they have just too many ad pages. (I don't love Fortune though -- I cannot digest the long articles that fills the magazine.)

No one is surprised that Red Herring, a magazine that once weighed two pounds an issue, is now brochure size. But longstanding business franchises like Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek are finding little traction in a post- Enron world. Thus far, 2005 has been bleak, with all three magazines flat or off from last year's miserable advertising numbers. As one of the arch headlines that are their stock-in-trade might suggest, "Stuck to the Bottom in a Rising Tide?"

During the bubble years, a windfall of an additional 35,000 advertising pages flowed into existing business publications, along with a bunch of newly thrown-together magazines, some cynically conceived just to get a place at the trough. But never mind the dreamy days of 2000 - business publications would love to get back to the good old days of 1995, pre-boom, pre-bust, practically pre-history. Last year, according to Media Industry Newsletter, the big three in business sold just over 10,000 advertising pages, a shadow of the 18,300 they sold in 2000. That drop is almost axiomatic, but they have yet to crawl back to their 1995 level of more than 11,500 pages sold. Collectively, the three are reporting almost half a billion dollars less in revenues in 2004 than they did in 2000. Those ad revenue numbers are notoriously inexact, but still represent a breathtaking hemorrhage.